THE ANDROGYNOUS WOMAN CHARACTER IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL

The concept of androgyny has both historical and current validity as a role model because an androgynous person moves beyond gender defined traits by choosing freely from a wide range of behaviors and attitudes without regard for the sex-role appropriateness of those choices. Androgyny is helpful in pointing out and clarifying what it means to be a woman. Precisely because of the awareness which it creates, androgyny is a concept which helps us explore human attitudes and behavior.;The novels chosen for this study best demonstrate the specific occurrence of androgyny being discussed. A chapter on Hawthorne is included because Hawthorne clearly represents the American author who seems to recognize the limitations of the female sex role yet refuses to accept his own characterizations of women who defy the stereotype to become androgynous.;In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James accepts the social norms of his period and therefore chooses a socially realistic form for the novel. However, James supports the androgynous development of his character insofar as the norms will allow that development. The result is a novel which illuminates the severely restricted possibilities for a woman who is unusually intelligent or independent.;Similarly, Kate Chopin's The Awakening demonstrates the degree to which societal expectations thwart androgynous potential. However, Chopin does not accept those norms as James does, so her novel must show the impossibility of an androgynous woman existing in a realistic setting. Finally, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground demonstrates how a lack of insight about the incompatibility of androgyny and social realism can result in an ambiguous conception of character.;As a perspective for literary criticism, androgyny has been thoroughly explored by only one person, Carolyn Heilbrun, in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. When Heilbrun considers American literature, she concludes that androgynous characterization began and ended with Hawthorne's portrayal of Hester Prynne. My study identifies the presence of potentially androgynous women throughout the American novel and shows why androgynous qualities are unrealized in the socially realistic novel but are possible in the apologue or speculative novel.;In order to show fully realized androgynous female characters, apologues are discussed. These novels demonstrate various ways of fictionalizing female role models. Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! are turn-of-the-century responses to a feminist movement seeking just such models. When the novelist works with a non-realistic form, the novelist is free to follow through on a new way of imagining women. Speculative fictions, which further re-define the social structures, have this same freedom to imagine. In fact, the creation of new social structures and the women who exist within them is the primary achievement of speculative fictions. The androgynous woman is the center of a Utopian culture in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland in which Gilman discusses the social structures of the Herlanders. Joanna Russ's The Female Man focuses primarily on new definitions of woman through the possibilities of science fiction. June Arnold's Applesauce rejects society's acceptance of sex-role stereotypes by revealing the roles a woman must shed in order to become whole.;The potential of women characters to become androgynous is found repeatedly in the socially realistic novel, but only in speculative fiction or fantasy are the social structures changed sufficiently to allow an androgynous characterization to occur. When, in a socially realistic novel, an androgynous woman character exists in a fully realized and fully accepted state, we can assume that the social structures have changed sufficiently to allow for new concepts of what it means to be a woman.